As of April 2010, a silent change was made on Foundry27, users with a myQNX account could no longer checkout/update their copies of the QNX SVN repositories and a vague Wiki page was created "detailing" some licencing clarifications.

This is why anyone who has used any sorts of alternative operating systems knows better than to depend on their systems being around long term, unless they are released under a true open source license.

How many times do we need to watch promising operating systems disappear once the companies behind them go away before we get wise to this?

This is why anyone who has used any sorts of alternative operating systems knows better than to depend on their systems being around long term

Since QNX has been around for over 25 years and is a commercially proven platform with millions of installations, people tend to know and depend on it for just that reason. It's not a experimental or research OS like Plan 9 or Minix, neither an also ran like BeOS.

If only BeOS source code was open-sourced back into 2002. Oh man... With all enormous work that Haiku team did in the past years and continues to do right now, they could be focused to improving OpenBeOS R6... If only...

OpenSolaris IS licence under a proper open source licence. It can be forked at any time. Just because the licence isn't Linux compatible, it doesn't mean it isn't true open source (as evident by the fact that FreeBSD has been able to implement ZFS)

OpenSolaris' problem is that most if the developers are Oracle. So if Oracle cease development on OpenSolaris, there may not be enough of a community to fork the project. But that would still be true if the licence was BSD or GPL (possibly worse as many Linux developers would have ported the best features of Solaris to Linux and then left Oracles OS to die - at least at with the current licence, there's an incentive to fork OpenSolaris).